Even from this distance, the inn’s peeling paint and sagging roof were easy to see. So was the murky ice. “It has seen better days.”
“Haven’t we all,” she said, “haven’t we all. That crumbling hotel pretty much sums up Oak Ridge, and all of us who’ve been here since the creation. We used to be young and smart and important—crossroads of the world, at least the world of atomic physics. Look at us now. The glory days are long gone. In a few more years, that hotel will be dust. And so will all the famous people who sat on the porch and figured out how to build the bomb fifty years ago. No, sixty years ago. No, sixty-five, dammit. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence—they’ve been gone a long time. Novak was one of the last. They don’t seem to make them like that anymore.”
“So you knew him?”
“It was a long, long time ago,” she said, “but yes, I did. There’s a story in it. Would you like to hear it sometime?”
“I believe I would,” I said. “I’m guessing you spin a pretty good story.”
“Come see me,” she said, “and we’ll find out.”
She dug around in a small pocketbook and fished out a pen. Folding the photocopied program from the memorial service in half to make it stiffer, she wrote her name, address, and phone number and handed the paper to me.
“Beatrice Novak,” the name read.
My eyes widened. She smiled slightly. “I was married to him,” she said. “Once upon a time.”
CHAPTER 11
I WASN’T READY TO LEAVE OAK RIDGE YET—I WANTED to steep myself a little longer in the sepia-toned sense of history Novak’s funeral had stirred up—so I drove past the strip malls lining Oak Ridge Turnpike and turned in at the American Museum of Science and Energy, a blocky, mud-colored brick building beside the police station. The sidewalk outside the building was edged with spiky components from coal-mining machines and oil-drilling rigs. Inside—through a doorway bordered by barbed wire and a replica of a World War II sentry post—a series of photos and videos and documents told the story of the Manhattan Project. One display panel featured scratchy footage of Albert Einstein, instantly recognizable from the wild mop of fuzzy white hair, captured on film writing a letter. Alongside the video monitor was an enlarged copy of the letter Einstein had sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939, voicing concern about Germany’s atomic-energy research and recommending that the United States embark on a quest to build an atomic bomb. Although it would be two years before much would happen, Einstein’s letter had planted a seed, and—at least in historical hindsight—was part of the bomb’s scientific pedigree.
What interested me most in the darkened room, though, were the wartime photos documenting the creation and wartime years of the town that came to be known as Oak Ridge. In three short years, a handful of rural settlements—family farms, country stores, rustic schoolhouses—was transformed into the biggest scientific and military endeavor in the history of the world.
An elderly museum docent wandered through, possibly because I looked like an unsavory character, but more likely because I was the only visitor and the docent was bored. “These photos are amazing,” I said.
“They have copies of all of these, plus a lot more down at the library,” he said. “In the Oak Ridge Room, which is the local history collection. If you’re interested, it’s worth a look. It’s in the Civic Center, just down the hill.” He pointed toward the back wall of the room, and I remembered seeing a pair of buildings, linked by an outdoor plaza and a fountain, set in a park below the police station. I thanked him and resumed wandering through the displays, which culminated in a short black-and-white film on the flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber that lumbered aloft from an airfield on the island of Tinian in the predawn hours of August 6, 1945. Many hours later and ten thousand pounds lighter, the Enola Gay returned to Tinian, having dropped a single bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Almost as an afterthought, the film included a brief segment on the decimation, three days later, of Nagasaki by a second atomic bomb. Two entire cities had been reduced to rubble, and many thousands of people vaporized, in the blink of an eye. And although the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small—scarcely firecrackers, compared to the massive hydrogen bombs developed during the 1950s and 1960s—the images of unprecedented devastation weighed on my heart.